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What would Spock do?

By Stuart LaidlawFAITH AND ETHICS REPORTER

Sun., May 10, 2009

As plot device and foreign policy, the Prime Directive is proving undeniably seductive, especially these days.

Penned by series creator Gene Roddenberry and inspired by his own distaste for the Vietnam War – which was raging when the original series went to air four decades ago – the Prime Directive is a tempting antidote to the interventionist years of the Bush administration.

But would the show's high-minded philosophy lead to utopia or make things even worse in the real world?

As Captain Jean-Luc Picard warns in the quote below on the right-hand side of this page, and Iraq bears out, intervening in the affairs of another society for any reason soon gets messy. And, just as Americans were looking for a way out of Vietnam when Star Trek came into being, they are looking for a way out of Iraq as the franchise is reborn this weekend.

A prequel to the 1960s TV series, the new Star Trek movie opened Thursday to rave reviews and huge box office to a world looking for simple solutions to complex problems.

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"We're all Trekkies now," Newsweek magazine declared in a cover story in which Trek fan Steve Daly compares U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policies to the Prime Directive.

"With the wilfullyhegemonic Bush administration now gone, the tenets of Roddenberry's fictional universe feel very much in step with current events," he writes.

"Whether you're happy about it or not, the Obama foreign policy, at least for now, emphasizes cross-cultural exchange and eschews imperialistic swagger.

"That sounds very much in sync with the Federation's Prime Directive... "

Really?

Kim Richard Nossal isn't convinced.

"We have to be careful not to overanalyze what started out as entertainment," the head of the politics department at Queen's University cautions.

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Then, at the Star's request, he sets about analyzing it.

"The Prime Directive has always been a bit of fantasy," he says.

However uncomfortable Americans get with their country's interventions in other countries, Nossal says, they always want to believe that they could interact with other societies without having a negative impact.

In fact, he adds, any person or country active on the world stage wants to believe it's possible to go into another society and not change it. The Prime Directive is a reflection of that desire.

"It allows you to believe the best of yourself," he says.

It's also just not true.

"Anything you do outside your borders is going tohave an impact," he says.

Even tourists visiting a country, spending money and talking to the locals will have an impact, Nossal points out. Their spending habits will alter the priorities of the local economy, and any cultural icons they bring with them – books or music or requests for food from home – will inevitably influence local customs.

The love of blues, country, and rock 'n' roll music in Britain, for instance, is largely attributed to the influence of North American soldiers stationed there during World War II. Likewise, cities such as Bangkok and Hong Kong were forever changed by the influence – and desires – of American soldiers on R and R from the Vietnam War, Nossal says.

At the time of the original series, the United States was entangled not only in Vietnam, Nossal says, but getting criticism for its activities in Latin America as well.

To Americans and post-imperial powers in Europe at that time, the notion that it was possible to go into other countries without changing them was irresistible.

Back in the 1960s, Canadians, with their relatively new invention of Peacekeeping troops, also needed to believe that the Prime Directive was possible, and maybe even part of our utopian future.

"This was sort of a late-'60s fantasy," says Nossal. "There's a lack of imperialism or colonialism about the Prime Directive."

THE DIRECTIVE, OF COURSE, was not entirely Roddenberry's invention. Its roots go all the way back to the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648 to end both the Thirty and Eighty Years' wars.

In it, the powers of Europe agreed to respect each other's territorial integrity and the right to determine their own destiny within their borders. It was the beginning of the modern nation state and the basis of the United Nations charter some 300 years later.

"The Prime Directive is a complete rip-off of United Nations Article 2," says Nossal, a specialist in international relations.

As for the evolution of the Prime Directive of Star Trek's fictional world, the origins are less clear.

It may have come from the Vulcans, who held off contact with Earth until humans had developed their first warp drive.

When articulated in the original series, the Prime Directive was a simple statement of just three sentences. But by the time of Star Trek: Voyager, set a century later, the directive is said to have had 47 sub-orders.

That may or may not be a reflection of the fact that while Captain James T. Kirk and his crew seemed to violate the Prime Directive with some regularity, the crews on the later series were more dedicated to honouring it.

Or it may have been a reflection of events in the real world.

As the first series went to air, the U.S. was going through an aggressive interventionist phase, overthrowing Latin American leaders and waging a war in Southeast Asia. Viewers of the original series, then, were offered a simple and seductive alternative to the world around them.

But by the time Star Trek: Voyager first aired in the mid-1990s, the United States had retreated to a much more isolationist position on the world stage. Its viewers got a lengthy legal document that justified watching world events from afar.

"The message of Voyager was that we learned from the mistakes of the 23rd century," says University of Arkansas law professor and Star Trek fan Richard Peltz, "we learned from the mistakes of James T. Kirk."

In the 1990s, the United States embraced isolationism as a response to the foreign-policy mistakes of previous decades, just as the Voyager crew thought about Captain Kirk's actions in the original series, says Peltz, who once wrote a Little Rock Law Review article on the post 9/11 manifestations of the Prime Directive.

"You have to torture popular culture quite a bit to get into it," jokes Peltz, who says he's seen all 79 episodes of the original series "dozens" of times.

Which brings us to today.

IN A WORLD WEARY of international intervention and coming out of a U.S. presidency that invented the doctrine of preventive strikes – intervening even before there was anything to intervene against – the simplicity of the Prime Directive is once again seductive.

Nossal warns, however, against adhering too closely to anything like the Prime Directive. Taken to its extreme, he says, it can be a justification for both isolationism and ignoring the needs of other countries under the guise of respecting their territorial integrity.

That kind of thinking, he says, is what allowed the genocide in Rwanda to go unheeded, an outcome now roundly seen as a failure by the international community to act when needed.

"There's no one out there who says that what goes on inside the borders of Rwanda is purely the business of Rwandans," he says.

It's an issue that the relatively short-lived Star Trek: Enterprise series examined in the episode Dear Doctor, in which the crew elected to allow a genetically stagnant species on a newly discovered planet to die off.

The value of something like the Prime Directive, Peltz says, is not in ignoring it or blindly following it, but in its mere existence. It gives us an ideal standard against which to measure any interaction with another culture or society, he says. "The Prime Directive is a moral declaration, not a rule of law."

In the fictional world of Star Trek, the Prime Directive has, for more than 40 years, given Starfleet crews a useful point of debate before taking action, Nossal says. "Applied on Earth, a kind of Prime Directive would cause us to give some thought to the things we do."

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